elevator communications Takes Home Top Honour in Digital Media Category, Reflecting the Changing Face of PR
TORONTO, April 29 /CNW/ – Last night, integrated Canadian Public Relations company, elevator communications inc., took home Gold for Best Digital Communications Campaign of the Year at the 2010 ACE (Achieving Communications Excellence) Awards, an annual industry gala hosted by the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) Toronto. It was the first year for Digital Communications (social media, social networking) to be recognized as a PR discipline, indicative of the exciting direction that the public relations industry is heading.
Jennifer Thompson, Director at elevator communications, ran ESSENSITY and the City, the 12-week August through October 2009 social media campaign for Schwarzkopf Professional’s Essensity brand, a professional line of colour, care and styling products. The challenge? Create a digitally led brand-building campaign with a focus on driving awareness and engaging the brand’s demographic through trial in a meaningful way.
The campaign involved a series of interactive Pop-Up Salons in Toronto. From a strategic perspective, elevator communications targeted the digital world to get the word out, driving traffic to a microsite where women made appointments for themselves and a girlfriend to enjoy a complimentary ESSENSITY and the City hair care experience at one of the participating salons.
“Within 72 hours of going live, we were fully booked and had started a waiting list,” says Thompson. “Digital media is playing an increasingly important role in how people get the news they’re looking for, so it was important to go to those sources – and they’re changing every day. We firmly believed the “instant” nature of social media would be the key to the campaign’s success.”
“ESSENSITY and the City was an exciting way for us to bring the brand to life,” says Marianne Medeiros, Marketing and Education Director for Schwarzkopf Professional. We would have never understood how social media could be executed by PR professionals if we hadn’t taken a chance and gone with elevator’s strategy.”
Winning this award means a great deal to elevator communications on many levels. “Most importantly,” says Melanie Rego, President of http://elevatorinc.com, “it’s about being recognized in an innovative PR discipline at the leading edge of communications. At the same time, it gives our industry credibility and reinforces what many of us have known for some time: Digital communications has a home in PR.”
“We’re constantly faced with questions like ‘Who owns social media?’ says Rego. “But, according to elevator communications, it’s not about who owns it. It’s about what you do with it.
“Social media now exists alongside all of our best traditional PR practices. It is engrained in how we plan and execute our strategies. We must embrace the digital world, as this is quite obviously the future of communications,” says Rego.
Without losing sight of what the overall business objective was that inspired elevator’s ESSENSITY and the City strategy, Schwarzkopf’s Medeiros says, “The bottom line is our sales remained strong throughout the recession. Did social media have anything to do with it? I believe it did.”